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Humanitarian Mine Action

Double demining success in Angola

Angola, 27/10/2006: After many months of hard work, the new DanChurchAid demining team in Angola is now ready to do their first official hand-over of a piece of land. With detectors, small shovels, brushes, and hands, the 40 deminers have inch by inch gone through every spot of the more than 3.3 hectare large area.

In the area where one mine had exploded earlier, they found one additional mine, three unexploded mortars and one hand-grenade. The area which is just outside Luena in the eastern part of Angola is now ready to host 60 families – all of them are very eager to construct their new houses.

Mine action team re-established

The immense effort and the coming hand-over event is a great encouragement to the DanChurchAid demining team in Angola. Last year the team suffered a terrible accident when a truck crashed; nine deminers where killed and many others severely injured. Since then, the demining team has been re-established. New deminers have been recruited, trained and the team organised to continue the operation. They are now up in full operation mode.

From Kosovo to Albania and to Angola

Afrim Bordoniqi from Kosovo has been the key figure during the process. Trained as a deminer and technical advisor by DanChurchAid during the demining activities in Kosovo and Albania, he continued to Angola where he has been critical in building the demining operation.

Hans Rune Kampenhøy, the operation manager in Angola, emphasizes that the task could not have been done without him:

“It has been a success in building a demining programme, but just as importantly it has been a success in building capacity,” he says.

Capacity building of staff

“DanChurchAid with the programmes in Kosovo and Albania has achieved something that very few other demining agencies have achieved,” Hans Rune underlines. Not less than five of the deminers from the very first DanChurchAid training course in Kosovo in July 1999 are now working with demining abroad, and three of them in Angola.

Hans Rune sees the forthcoming hand-over as a celebration of both local effort and of international cooperation and capacity building. And he now hopes that the capacity building of staff in Angola will achieve similar long-lasting results.

The programme in Angola has already achieved to appoint the first national team supervisor, Hendrix, who heads the Mine Risk Education Team, and Afrim has trained his national counterpart, Francisco Kapinala, so he is ready to take over.

By Christian Friis Bach ( cfb@dca.dk ) is International Director in DanChurchAid and is currently visiting the DCA demining activities in Angola.